Landscaping a site involves multiple tasks to prepare it for the desired plantings. Where a site is covered with plantings already, such as a lawn that is being prepared for a new landscaping design, removal of the sod, often in large measures, is usually necessary. This sod usually will not be reused, so removal with its preservation in mind is not required.
Several different devices exist for this purpose, each with its own shortcomings. Often, the sod/upper soil layer is simply bladed off using a blade attached to a skid-steer loader, tractor, or other similar motive power source. At other times a bucket attached to such a motive power source may be used to remove the top soil layer. Removal of the sod in this manner with a blade or bucket, however, often results in an uneven landscape requiring substantial reworking later because one side of the blade or bucket will almost invariably dig into the ground deeper than the other side will. The result, then, is a gouge that must be corrected with additional reworking of the top soil layer to smooth the surface.
An additional shortcoming of the present devices relates to the manner in which a site must be worked using them. Using the presently available devices both to separate the soil layer and to simultaneously move it takes a substantial amount of power. The equipment operator is limited to working only small patches of the surface at a time since once a certain amount of soil has been accumulated in front of the blade or bucket, loader or tractor will be unable to both shear the soil layer and push the sheared soil. The separated soil and foliage must be removed to a pile for subsequent handling and disposal. Then, the operator must go back and start again where he left off. At least in part because of this, removal of the top soil layer and plantings can take a considerable amount of time as the operator is required to traverse the same ground over and over again.
It would be desirable to have an apparatus both for the selective separation of the top layer of soil and foliage to a desired depth and for the subsequent removal of the separated layer.